Media Exploitation Quotes

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason. There's also a negative side.

Celebrities, even insignificant ones like me, are created to be abused by the Great Unwashed.

I never liked the Oscars. They didn't do too much for me at all. I felt like a big, vulnerable hunk of baloney being used to sell some products.

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.

Playboy exploits sex the way Sports Illustrated exploits sports.

This is a career about images. It's celluloid; they last for ever. I'm a black woman from America. My people were slaves in America, and even though we're free on paper and in law, I'm not going to allow you to enslave me on film, in celluloid, for all to see.

As a mom, I always feel I have to protect them. I talk about them because they are the most important things in my life but they are private people. I won't use them for my own press.

Oliver North says he is very upset that John Walker could come back to this country and cash in on his celebrity status. He hates to see someone who did something wrong get rewarded by writing a book or getting a TV show out of it.

Ryan Murphy, he basically tries to find something that's a pulse, a pressure point in our culture, and he grabs it, and he squeezes it. I think 'Freak Show' has a lot to do with the entertainment industry and the way we entertain ourselves: the objectification of people and the lengths we'll go for our own amusement.

I'm also 31 years old. It's not like I'm some kid who can be slapped across the newspaper pages like some harlot.

The press is like a big bass, you just stick a hook in their mouth and they'll take it.

The Factor concept is very simple: Watch all of those in power, including and especially the media, so they don't injure or exploit the folks, everyday Americans. Never before in the United States had a television news guy dared to criticize other journalists on a regular basis. The late Peter Jennings, a friend, told me I was crazy to do it. "These people will not allow anyone to scrutinize them," he said. "They will come after you with a vengeance." And so they have.

Madonna is a pro. I don't like her and have no respect for her but- I don't think she should be called a musician or a dancer or whatever you know, but I do have, well I do have respect for her ability to completely manipulate the media and have them work for her.

Your cameras can't control the minds of those who know, that you'll even sell your soul just to get a story sold.

I often find myself worrying about celebrities. It's an entirely caring thing; it's not like the people who commission those photographs with cruel arrows to go on the covers of the celebrity magazines. The photographs show botched plastic surgery, raging eczema, weight gain and horrible clothes for maximum schadenfreude.

When we are out there selling a new picture, when did it become part of the deal that you have to sell the family? To use the juicy part of your life to get attention? I'm not blaming the reporters. It's the system.

I feel like I can't be sick without some story being made up or some photos being sold a month later.

The paramedic called the press and sold me like a loaf of bread. This was news, and he wanted to be the one to report it.

I don't buy these rag magazines that feed off of stolen, you know, press. They're basically stealing someone's image in order to make money for themselves... They wait at the end of my street in their cars. Every time I exit my home, I have company.

If I ever modelled for Calvin Klein I'd give myself to a flock of fans to beat me silly with a baseball bat.

Media outlets that are exploiting Ebola because they want a sensational story and politicians using it to their own ends ought to be ashamed.

It's been reported that some of Arnold Schwarzenegger's opponents have been circulating naked pictures of Arnold on the Internet. Yeah, in a related story, Arnold is leading the other candidates by four inches.

People can take your name and write a book about you and they make money off of it. How is the public supposed to know you're not authorizing that book? As soon as you make a big stink about it it only makes the book sell more.

It's the tabloids, with their intense commercial need to get scoops to bring in readers, that run a regime of fear, where reporters are bullied, shouted at. That's where things go wrong.

Old ladies photographed by CBS who announced that they would die of malnutrition if Reagan's bill were passed could probably have saved themselves their impending penury by the simple device of applying to the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists for scale every time they were featured by Dan Rather or whoever.